nearly decomposable

Three views of the Odyssey

I’ve been thinking of ways to describe the differences between information visualizations with respect to maps, diagrams, and lists. Here’s The Odyssey as a geographic map:

The first thing that I notice is just how far Odysseus travelled. That’s about half of the Mediterranean! I thought that it all happened close to Greece. Maps afford this understanding. They are diagrams that support the plotting of trajectories.Which brings me to the point that we lose a lot of information about relationships in narratives. That’s not their point. This doesn’t mean that non-map diagrams don’t help sometimes. Here’s a chart of the characters and their relationships in the Odyssey:

There is a lot of information here that is helpful. And this I do remember and understood from reading the book. Stories are good about depicting how people interact. But though this chart shows relationships, the layout does not really support navigation. For example, the gods are all related by blood and can pretty much contact each other at will. This chart would have Poseidon accessing Aeolus and Circe by going through Odysseus. So this chart is not a map.

Lastly, is the relationship that comes at us through search. Because the implicit geographic information about the Odyssey is not specifically in the text, a search request within the corpora cannot produce a result that lets us integrate it

There is a lot of ambiguity in this result, which is similar to other searches that I tried which included travel, sail and other descriptive terms. This doesn’t mean that it’s bad, it just shows how search does not handle context well. It’s not designed to. It’s designed around precision and recall. Context requires a deeper understanding about meaning, and even such recent innovations such as sharded views with cards, single answers, and pro/con results only skim the surface of providing situationally appropriate, meaningful context.